Rebecca Erbelding, a historian, archivist, and curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will be delivering the 31st David W. Belin Lecture in American Jewish Affairs virtually on March 16, 2021. Her lecture will explore Raoul Wallenberg’s work on behalf of the War Refugee Board in Budapest, Hungary as revealed by United States government records.


Raoul Wallenberg, one of the most famous Holocaust-era rescuers, was only 32 years old when he was arrested and disappeared in January 1945, 10 years after graduating from the University of Michigan. “My goal is to restore the context of Budapest, the context of Washington, the relationships between all these events and people, and to explain how the chaos of the Holocaust and the war limited the possibility of carrying out any preconceived plan for his rescue work,” explained Erbelding.


Her book, Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe, won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Writing Based on Archival Material. A key challenge in writing her book was in organizing the War Refugee Board’s records, 120 boxes still in roughly the order they were in the 1940s, organized by topic and name. She spent two years digitalizing and organizing hundreds of thousands of pages before she began to read through the records.


She stresses that the most important message from the book is the impact public and private pressure can have on the United States government. “Without this pressure, Roosevelt likely would not have established the War Refugee Board, which ultimately saved tens of thousands of lives. It’s an important reminder and inspiration for humanitarian activists today,” Erbelding stated.


She believes that the War Refugee Board wasn’t more widely known before now for a few reasons. When teaching about the Holocaust, most schools don’t have time to focus on the American and international response, and the general summary is that the United States didn’t do enough. She believes this is broadly true, but adds that it ignores those who were pushing for the US to take action since 1933. “The history is utterly fascinating, but there’s no quick way to tell it without simply listing off the War Refugee Board’s vast array of efforts. And the outcome of these efforts isn’t an easy answer either. For a host of reasons there is no way to reasonably calculate exactly how many people they ‘saved,’” said Erbelding. “But even without easily understood outcomes, I argue it is important to honor the efforts of the War Refugee Board staff and use their work as an example for confronting humanitarian challenges today.”


The Belin lecture series was established in 1991 through a generous gift from the late David W. Belin of Des Moines and New York to provide an academic forum for the discussion of contemporary Jewish life in the United States. Previous scholars to hold this honor include Deborah Lipstadt, Samuel Freedman, Ruth Messinger, Jim Loeffler, Beth Wenger, and Lila Corwin Berman among others. Each year, the lecture is also published in written form in collaboration with Michigan Publishing.
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